Robotics Engineer

Station Keeping of Quadrotor

The goal was to develop a completely autonomous quadrotor that could land on stationary platform and perform indoor surveying with only an IMU and a camera for navigation.

As part of a team of three, built a custom quadrotor using brushless motors, electronic speed controllers and LiPo battery that were mounted on a spruce wood frame.

Estimated position of the quadrotor with an algorithm that uses images of the marker on the ground. Using the images from the downward facing monocular camera, the thrusts of each of the motor is controlled by a cascaded PID controller.

Designed an Arduino Mega board with Xbee transmitter on USB adapter on quadrotor to send the camera data to the ground control station which sends throttle, roll, pitch and yaw commands back to the Xbee receiver which communicates with the APM autopilot.

Successfully implemented the solution on an AR Drone for a stationary platform. The future aim is to implement it on the custom quadrotor and also modify the algorithm for landing on a moving platform.